Night lamps and table lamps are important apparatus of the human life at home. Turn-on/off switches are important electrical components of night lamps and table lamps, namely because they are the user interface or the human-machine interface (HMI) of those apparatus. In each home there are many night lamps and table lamps, normally more than the number of people living in those homes. The most popular night lamps and table lamps are mainly turned-on/off by three types of switches, by having into consideration the position on the lamp where they are mounted: (i) attached to the bulb's base (e.g. pushbutton switches and rotating/twist switches), (ii) attached to the base support of the lamp (e.g. pushbutton switches and pole switches), or (iii) attached to the power cord of the lamp (e.g. slider switches, rotary switches, and pole switches).
About the functionality of adjusting the luminosity of the bulb's lamps, with the passive rotating or twist switches it is possible to select two levels of luminosity by selecting one or the two filaments of a 3-way bulb, and with active slider or twist dimmer switches it is possible to continuously dimming the luminosity from zero percent to the full luminosity of the bulb.
Turn-on/off switches may perform the functionality of turning-on, turning-off, or the adjusting of the luminosity of the bulbs of the night lamps and table lamps. However, a user still needs to find, access, and handle the turn-on/off switches of the lamps before he/she can use the device. This operation is still a hard task, mainly, either due to those switches are not easily accessible to the user's hands, or are not simple and easy to be accessed and operated. Sometimes, the device is out of the range of the user's hands, and/or the power cord device is lost behind or beyond the nightstand or table, and/or the device is hard to handle.
In more advanced models of lamps are used touch sensor command features, where with the sequentially touching of a hand in the metallic body of the lamps, the bulb's luminosity changes between low-medium-high-off levels. Also, there are lamps with the functionality of human motion detection based on a PIR (Passive Infrared) sensor, which automatically turn-on when a human motion is sensed and automatically turn-off after a pre-determined period of time. Furthermore, those lamps can have the functionality of daylight detection, by which the light can be turned-on with pre-determined level of darkness or vice-versa. There are also some lamps with the functionality of turning-on/off under human hand motion detection based on a single PIR sensor, using short range detection (lower than 4-inch, 10 cm), which toggles between turn-on and turn-off by the simple motion of the hand. Such arrangements are relatively inaccurate and/or not simple neither easy to operate. Using the detection of a human body or the darkness level to turn-on or turn-off the bulbs of night lamps is inaccurate, therefore not adequate to use in a night lamp apparatus, namely because, either some human body motion in the field of detection of the PIR sensor, or some level of darkness, immediately can turn-on or turn-off the bulb's light, which can be very inconvenient (e.g. if the user is moving on the bed during the night turning on the light by accident or want to place or remove any object over the nightstand or table turning off the lamp inadvertently). Furthermore, the turn-off timer, the no-human body motion detection, or the dawning detection, are also impracticable for such lamps.
It is so desirable to introduce user-friendliness in night lamps and table lamps, through the introduction of new functions/functionalities able to humanize their human-machine interfaces (HMI), whilst still providing simple and easy operation of the apparatus. That's why night lamps and table lamps being commanded remotely without turn-on/off switches have been used.
The introduction of user-friendliness in night lamps and table lamps, through the introduction of new functions and/or functionalities allows to humanize their human-machine interfaces (HMI), whilst still providing simple and easy operation of the apparatus. Currently there are available several technologies to perform the HMI. Therefore, night lamps and table lamps can be commanded remotely without turn-on/off switches by several ways.
Nowadays the HMI tend to be more user friendliness by using natural human-like modes of communication, e.g. through the voice and body gestures decoding, or both, where any verbal communication is usually complemented by non-verbal elements, including hand/body gesturing. Therefore, the HMI that interpret hand gestures as a mode of machine/device input can provide a natural means of interaction with the user.
The HMI contactless command of the electronic appliances is becoming increasingly usual, namely due to the better affinity between the end user and the machine. Also, the contactless gesturing input can reduce keyboard/device surface contamination, which can be an advantage in dirty or clean environments, in the navigation through on-screen contents and/or menus. In several appliances the hands gesturing and voice recognition are already used to provide the base modes of interaction opposing to the HMI based in hardware keyboards or the now popularized capacitive touch screens.
The current commercial gesturing-based HMI are realized, either by processing video streams from a front-facing camera, and/or by specialized emission/reception optoelectronic devices, or by the use of a plane of electric field electrodes to be disturbed by the motion gestures and those perturbations are after computed to command the device. Unfortunately, the video-based systems by specialized optoelectronic devices and video-cams require reasonable energy for capturing the gestures, and in some cases, the illumination of the video scenarios. Most of these systems are either complex having high computer processing requirements, leading to be very expensive, or have limited short distance (several inches/centimeters—max. 4″/10 cm) range of operation between the input device and the gestures to be captured, in a plane parallel to the plane of the device (the gestures should be done facing the decoding device).
Furthermore, most of these systems don't have low power consumption preventing their use in devices where the low power consumption is a mandatory requirement, e.g. in IoT (Internet of Things) remote devices, which may normally be powered by small batteries (e.g. coin batteries).
In simple human detection systems for use in intrusion or automation systems (alarms, lighting turn-on or turn-off, etc.) there are some motion and proximity switches, based in Passive Infrared sensors, or the well popularized PIR sensors, which can only provide limited on/off functionalities.
PIR sensors are used to sense thermal energy emitted by the human body, detecting emitted, rather than reflected energy. The sensing range distance of the PIR sensors can be from a few millimeters to tens of meters, with the adequate Fresnel lens coupled. Thus, in these night lamps and table lamps the devices based on PIR sensors in the current state of the art practice/technologies are not well suited to decode with the necessary accuracy the user's gesturing movements, and therefore are only well suited to detect the presence/absence of human infrared (IR) radiation, in big landscape scenarios (e.g. intrusion alarms or similar).
With the current state of the art devices and technologies, there are in the market PIR devices based on arrays of 2×2 sensing elements (or bigger arrays) arranged over the same plane (e.g. encapsulated in the same case). When these devices are exposed to situations of asymmetrical planes of gesture decoding, and the user's hand is not facing the decoding device of gesture decoding, or there is a long range of decoding, only trapezoidal areas can be presented to the gesturing decoding plane, and it may be hard or almost impossible to decode the true or false gesturing without complex processing capacity, especially if the gesturing is done far from the decoding devices.
In general, the disadvantages of almost all the available HMI systems are that they may be inaccurate in commanding the lighting apparatus, and that may include the inability to select and command multiple lighting apparatus, in a simple and easy way, and/or may be complex and expensive due to the use of video-based technologies, with high computer processing requirements (video-cams, computer vision and digital image processing), and/or may have considerable power consumption, and therefore cannot be powered by small batteries neither being able to be used in night lamps and table lamps.